I never use the IDE anymore personally for various reasons for example i use in all of my apps custom variables for fontname and fontsize and unfortunately the IDE doesnt recognize those.
On the other hand my colleague Nikos(quartz56) uses the IDE all the time, so i guess it depends on what suits you best. As others suggested i would start slowly using the IDE and when you are more comfortable with the control definitions i would move over to manually writing the code.